how to stay in community

🦔 tell the people you love them 🧡

digitally hand-drawn piece of mt. rainier, finally complete (2022)

greetings, greetings to you, dear reader.

i spent my weekend in more social situations than usual, and thus, this tuesday morning, i am back at my computer, peeling away the layers of sunscreen and lake water, to continue the pulse of this practice. in community with you.

i get very emotional around holidays, no matter what the holiday is. the emotion itself runs the gamut, but sometimes that emotion plays out as sentimentality, which is how i’m feeling today.

if i’m well-prepared, i can find some cave to hide in whilst the festivities are at play, emerging only once the dust has settled the day after. i did not do that this year.

as i’ve written before, there are holidays that i fundamentally disagree with. i don’t need today’s dispatch to be a regurgitation of my thoughts and feelings on the matter, but know they are there for you, should you like to tuck in.

this year, different from all of the other years, i’ve found myself in a true community with folks — really, for the first time in my life.

if you’ve been around for the early days of this dispatch, you’ll remember that a goal of my quest was to find my people, my community. to see if there was, in fact, a place where i could plant roots and consider the possibility of staying for awhile.

i laugh, thinking about the way that i landed in this valley between the mountains. because it didn’t feel like a choice, it felt like an inevitable.

it didn’t feel like a consideration, it felt like a place i wanted to try staying for awhile. hopefully, longer than awhile.

and i think about how that release, that acceptance was simple, in a time of immense complications.

how that acceptance was simple, and, therefore, easy.

this rumination comes at the front of my month of birth: a true sun child, i am.

i wrote down in my notes app this morning that there’s a version of me that didn’t think i was going to make it to 25. i remember, in some version of my mind, that i recalled something similar about 24. and 23. and 22.

to be alive in the world — oh, what a gift. sometimes a cruel one. but a gift, nonetheless.

and my aliveness, complex but constant, in that my heart continues to beat, reminds me that we do not know how long we’re going to live.

so, my promises to myself in this past year of aging have settled into three camps:

1. tell the people you love them
   tell the people you love them
   tell the people you love them
   we do not know how long we are going to live
   

2. i owe it to myself to see every messy part of life all the way through, to not run away when i get scared
   

3. simplicity begets ease

we have twenty more days before i pass another revolution of the sun. i’m sure there’s a philosophy in here, emerging, pulsing, ready to be held up for all to see.

but i’m here just to say for today:

tell the people you love them, for we do not know how long we are going to live.

onward

sara

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